1inch

How 1inch Drove 3,200 First-Swap Wallets at a $25 CPA with Blockchain-Ads

−54%

lower CPA — $54 → $25 per First-Swap Wallet

3,200

First-Swap Wallets acquired

0.71%

CTR

11.3M+

verified impressions; 2.41% click-to-first-swap rate; $1.04 CPC at scale.

Objective

First-Swap Wallet Activation

‍

Primary KPI

CPA per First-Swap Wallet (executed within 14 days)

Industry

North America, Western Europe, India, SEA

Duration

7 months

Key Markets

North America, Western Europe, India, SEA

About the Brand

1inch is a leading DEX aggregator that routes users to the best on-chain swap pricing across dozens of liquidity sources. The protocol's core value proposition is that no single DEX can match an aggregator's effective price across ETH-mainnet, L2 ecosystems, and EVM-compatible chains.

Target Audience: Crypto-active users with multi-chain DeFi behavior—particularly users who currently swap on a single DEX and have not yet adopted aggregator routing.

Growth Stage: Enterprise / Established Protocol.

The Challenge

Drive qualified protocol activations—wallets that arrived, connected, and executed a first swap within 14 days. Click metrics, email signups, and Twitter follows were not the unit the team was measuring. However, there were come obstacles to achieving these:

Key Obstacles

Vanity-metric trap. Most paid channels available to a DeFi protocol deliver clicks and email captures; neither correlates with on-chain activation.
Audience invisibility. Mainstream platforms have no native targeting layer for "users who currently swap on Uniswap but haven't tried 1inch."
Crypto-platform restrictions. Token-related messaging is policy-restricted on Google, Meta, and TikTok.
Attribution drift. Without a wallet-level signal, the team could not connect a click to an on-chain swap action.

The Blockchain-Ads

Before switching to Blockchain-Ads, 1inch used sponsored editorial, conference activations, and influencer partnerships, which could deliver wallet downloads but not first-swap activations.

Decision Drivers

Wallet-level audience targeting and attribution — segments built on confirmed swap behavior on competing DEXes.
Web3 publisher network — placements adjacent to DeFi dashboards and analytics platforms.
Compliance-aware creative review — protocol-level creative that passed scrutiny on Web3 inventory mainstream platforms could not serve.
Cross-protocol behavioral signal — the ability to bid for users active on Uniswap or Sushi but not yet 1inch.

Unique Capabilities Leveraged

DEX-active wallet segments — wallets executing swaps on Uniswap, Sushi, Curve, Balancer, Camelot.
Multi-chain DEX-trader segments — users active across L1 and L2 ecosystems.
Aggregator-curious wallet segments — wallets demonstrating slippage-conscious behavior.
Wallet retargeting for connected-but-not-swapped cohorts.

Three commitments before launch: (1) primary KPI was First-Swap Wallet CPA — wallet connected and executed first swap within 14 days; (2) creative led with savings-narrative ("better price across X liquidity sources"); (3) bot-traffic suppression at zero tolerance.

Results

Before Blockchain-Ads → After Blockchain-Ads

CPA (per First-Swap Wallet): ~$54 → $25
CTR: 0.10% → 0.71%
Click → First Swap: 0.94% → 2.41%
30-day Repeat-Swap Rate: 32% → 57%

Activated cohorts acquired through Blockchain-Ads showed 57% 30-day repeat-swap rates and meaningfully higher cross-chain swap behavior. The campaign produced a defensible spend-to-on-chain-action chain — the first time the team could attribute paid spend directly to swap volume in a way internal stakeholders accepted.

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Inactive-State

Active State

Execution

Phase 1 — Learning (Month 1)

Objective: Identify the DEX-active wallet behaviors most predictive of aggregator adoption.

Actions:

Four wallet behavioral segments tested: Uniswap-only swappers (>3 swaps in 90 days), Multi-DEX swappers (active on 2+ aggregators or DEXes), L2-active swappers (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base), Stablecoin-pair swappers (high-velocity stablecoin movement)
Six creative variants — split between savings-led and product-led
Geo split: NA (35%), Western Europe (30%), India (20%), SEA (15%)

Insights:

Uniswap-only swappers converted to first-swap-on-1inch at 3.4x the rate of multi-DEX control.
Savings-led creative outperformed product-led on click-to-swap rate by 41%.
L2-active swappers converted at higher CPA but with 2.7x the 30-day swap-volume per user.

Phase 2 — Consideration (Month 2–3)

Objective: Concentrate budget on Uniswap-only and L2-active segments and tighten the activation funnel.

Actions:

65% of budget reallocated to Uniswap-only swappers and L2-active segments.
Creative cycle moved to weekly. Savings-led creative locked as primary funnel-entry.
Funnel rebuilt: a wallet-aware swap-preview surfaced for connected wallets with detected DEX history, showing the actual savings on a sample swap before requiring the swap commitment. Reduced first-swap drop-off by ~29%.

Performance Improvements:

CTR climbed 0.34% → 0.78%.
CPC compressed $1.40 → $0.95.
Click-to-first-swap rate improved 0.94% → 2.61%.

Phase 3 — Activation + Retargeting (Month 4–7)

Objective: Scale activation volume while keeping CPA under $35 ceiling.

Actions:

Daily spend lifted 3.0x against winning cohorts.
Wallet-based retargeting for connected wallets that didn't swap within 7 days.
Behavioral retargeting for users who connected and routed but didn't execute the swap.
Volatility-window bid surging activated during high-DEX-volume crypto-market windows.
Geo expansion into Vietnam, Brazil, Turkey — all three cleared the CPA threshold.